Peter X Feng received his B.A. in American Studies from Yale University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Film Studies from The University of Iowa. He was Chancellor's Distinguished Visiting Professor of Film Studies at UC-Irvine (1997-98) and a member of the Advisory Board for Wayne State University Press' Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series since 2003. Dr. Feng has published articles in Cinema Journal, Cineaste, Amerasia Journal, Jump Cut, Camera Obscura, and elsewhere. Screening Asian Americans (2002), a collection of essays on Asian Americans and Film, was published by Rutgers University Press; Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video (2002), was published by Duke University Press. Dr. Feng teaches courses in Theory, Asian American Literature, and Film Studies: recent courses include "Sex and Violence in Asian American Literature," "Texts and Contexts: Movies, Novels, Comics," "The Hollywood Musical," and the graduate seminar "Narrating Race, Narrating Nation."

Degrees

Ph.D.,
Communication Studies (Film Studies),
University of Iowa, 1996

M.A.,
Communication Studies (Film Studies),
University of Iowa, 1992

B.A.,
Distinction in American Studies,
Yale University, 1988

Research Projects

Publications

​Chinese Connections is a valuable new anthology that provides a prismatic look at the cross-fertilization between Chinese film and global popular culture. Leading film scholars consider the influence of world cinema on China-related and Chinese-related cinema over the last five decades. Highlighting the neglected connections between Chinese films and American and European cinema, the editors and contributors examine popular works such as Ang Lee’s The Hulk and Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep to show the nexus of international film production and how national, political, social and sexual identities are represented in the Chinese diaspora.

With talent flowing back and forth between East and West, Chinese Connections explores how issues of immigration, class, race and economic displacement are viewed on a global level, ultimately providing a greater understanding of the impact of Chinese filmmaking at home and abroad.

This innovative essay collection explores Asian American cinematic representations historically and socially, on and off screen, as they contribute to the definition of American character. The history of Asian Americans on movie screens, as outlined in Peter X Feng's introduction, provides a context for the individual readings that follow. Asian American cinema is charted in its diversity, ranging across activist, documentary, experimental, and fictional modes, and encompassing a wide range of ethnicities (Filipino, Vietnamese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese). Covered in the discussion are filmmakers Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ang Lee, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Wayne Wangand films such as The Wedding Banquet, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, and Chan is Missing.

Throughout the volume, as Feng explains, the term screening has a twofold meaning referring to the projection of Asian Americans as cinematic bodies and the screening out of elements connected with these images. In this doubling, film representation can function to define what is American and what is foreign. Asian American filmmaking is one of the fastest growing areas of independent and studio production. This volume is key to understanding the vitality of this new cinema.

​This innovative book shows how Asian American filmmakers and videomakers frame and are framed by history—how they define and are defined by cinematic projections of Asian American identity. Combining close readings of films and videos, sophisticated cultural analyses, and detailed production histories that reveal the complex forces at play in the making and distributing of these movies, Identities in Motion offers an illuminating interpretative framework for assessing the extraordinary range of Asian American films produced in North America.